Sorry, you cannot buy ChicagoBlackhawks.sucks

If your job involves protecting your company from online assaults, it's about to get harder.

On June 19, the new URL suffix ".sucks" will go up for sale to the general public, allowing any angry customer, Internet troll or bored person to buy a "Company.sucks" domain for $250. Right now, the domains, sold by online registrar Vox Populi, can be pre-emptively purchased by companies that own their trademarks—at 10 times the price.

So far, Chicago entities including McDonald's, Edelman and the Chicago Blackhawks have ponied up the $2,500 (which must be paid annually) to claim their .sucks sites and deny someone else the opportunity to exploit them.

"I would think all the major consumer brands are snapping up their names," said Andrew Goldstein, a partner in the corporate practice group at Chicago law firm Freeborn & Peters. "But it becomes more of an interesting question when I'm counseling my smaller, mid-market clients. How much do you really care if you find Acme.sucks? What happens if you register Acme.sucks to be safe, but then someone else registers AcmeReally.sucks?"

(There are other suffixes—referred to as generic top-level domains—such as .xxx, .porn and .wtf, which means you could spend quite a bit of money and time defending your company.)

The .sucks pricing, which Goldstein described as "rather extortionistic," also has been pilloried by federal lawmakers and by Icann, formerly known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit that oversees Internet addresses. During a May congressional hearing, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R.-Va., said trademark holders are being "shaken down," Bloomberg News reported.

Vox Populi and its owner, Momentous, which lists addresses in Canada, Barbados and Turks and Caicos, paid $3 million for rights to the .sucks domains last fall. It initially planned to charge companies and other trademark holders $25,000 to pre-emptively register.

FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTION

No one's sure how many companies have paid to pre-register, though Vox Populi runs a scrolling list of recently purchased addresses. But the demand for .sucks should be great, considering that there are more than 65,000 .com addresses that already incorporate the word "sucks," Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said at that House hearing, according to the Washington Post.

Despite the outcry, Goldstein said Vox Populi is protected by the First Amendment. A site ending in .sucks is not covered by trademark law because there is no possibility of confusion: No one would mistake Amazon.sucks for Amazon.com. "We can call it a scam, a form of extortion or predatory pricing, but these guys are cloaking themselves in the First Amendment and saying that consumers deserve a place to air their grievances against companies," he says.

The .sucks domains are particularly vexing to executives, Goldstein said. "What happens when a CEO's young daughter goes to Google Daddy's name on a Saturday morning and Daddy.sucks pops up?"

But CEOs may not have to live in fear forever. Actor Kevin Spacey is fighting back by becoming one of the first individuals to register his name as a trademark, Goldstein says.

The downside is that the process in the U.S. takes eight to 10 months. The upside is that other countries have an easier, faster trademark process. "I hear there are some where you can get registration in a day or two," Goldstein says, though he did not name specific countries.

The availability of .sucks and other potentially problematic suffixes arises from Icann's decision to expand the web address naming system in 2012.

On a happier note, .rocks also is largely (and generally more cheaply) available. BrigidSweeney.rocks, for example, costs a mere $8.99 from GoDaddy.com.